A look at my interview with ArtsWestchester CEO Janet Langsam:
To look at her, you might think she’s a school teacher. But Georgette Gouveia is actually the feisty editor of the smart and sassy WAG, a monthly magazine dedicated to serving up a piquant dish of stories to keep tongues wagging. Gouveia is also the author of a hot-off-the press, and I do mean hot, racy novel “Water Music.” Yes, she certainly does keep tongues wagging.
Deftly, and with great trepidation, I tried to dig beneath Gouveia’s cool, conservative, sometimes almost prim, exterior to fathom why a gal like her would fantasize in her book about four gay, male athletes. Turns out she’s fascinated by men, thinks they’re the hotter sex, likes making up stories, loves to analyze relationships and rivalries, and above all, is a sports fan. So put all of that together and you have a pot boiler of a fan fiction novel, which has allowed the author, a very female writer, to explore men (in prose of course) and at the same time she says “take women out of the equation.” So just how does that work, I asked. Explains the author, “it’s a book about men, their sexuality, their historical role as sex objects, particularly in art, their relationships and rivalries, and how shifts in fortunes change the dynamics of submission and dominance.” Known for her expertise as an art critic and connoisseur, Gouveia references neoclassical painting and sculpture which treated men as objects – “tamed and framed, encased in bronze or stone,” and offered for the “wayward gaze of women and gay men.”
So is this book really all about power and control, I speculated. Yes indeed! Gouveia assures me that there is a lot of interest on the part of females in gay male lovers. “Take the film ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ for example…80% of the audience has been women.” She got that figure directly from Ang Lee, the film’s director. While the jury is still out on this type of fiction, what can be said is that women are certainly wandering into uncharted waters, so to speak, and declaring their freedom and right to do so. It’s a matter of control. In that regard Gouveia likes to quote the Oscar winning song: “It’s time to see what I can do. To test the limits and break through. No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I’m free.”